


you will need somebody

by fuckitfireeverything



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Christmas fic, M/M, Minor Character Death, takes place between 3a and 3b
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 22:46:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1099472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuckitfireeverything/pseuds/fuckitfireeverything
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I have something important to tell you.”</p><p>Danny feels a laugh bubbling up inside him, a dry, humorless bark of a laugh stuck underneath his tongue and behind his lungs, and he has to take a second to swallow it down because jesus, he doesn't want anyone thinking he's gone absolutely insane, even if it's just Stiles.</p><p>“Scott already told me about werewolves,” he says instead, and starts to close the door.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you will need somebody

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theonewiththelonghair](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theonewiththelonghair/gifts).



_Ken Mahealani, 46, of Beacon Hills, California died Saturday, December 7th, at Beacon Hills Memorial Hospital of wounds sustained in an animal attack the Wednesday before._

_Ken was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to Joseph and Noelani Mahealani on March 5th, 1967. He graduated from University of California, Berkeley with a degree in elementary education and went on to receive a Masters in education. He was married to Samantha Kalani on July 2nd, 1989._

_Ken taught kindergarten and first grade at Beacon Hills elementary for twenty years._

_He is survived by his loving mother, wife, and three children – Daniel (17), Emily (13), and Josh (6)._

_A public viewing will be held Thursday, from 6p.m. to 8p.m. at Green Family Funeral Home. In lieu of flowers, the Mahealani family asks that donations be made to the Beacon Hills public library._

…

 

The doorbell jolts Danny awake and he's left with just the hazy, panicky feeling of an unremembered nightmare. He catches his breath and looks around, trying to remember what day it is and why he's on the couch instead of in his room. He doesn't remember falling asleep, definitely doesn't remember draping the old knit blanket over himself before doing so, but the doorbell is still ringing, a loud, impatient whine, again and again like the person responsible hasn't yet been taught that you aren't supposed to hold the button down for longer than a second 

It's probably just another neighbor bringing over food, he thinks, rolling his eyes. Like we're incapable of cooking just because we're grieving. The neighbors don't know his mom habitually cooks when she's anxious. There's never been so much food in their kitchen.

But it seems like there's no one else home, if he can judge from the fact that no one's gotten the door yet, so he pushes himself up off the couch, runs a hand through his hair to tame it just a little, so he doesn't look like he's been passed out on the couch, and opens the door.

“Danny, hey, sorry, I thought you weren't going to be home.”

Danny thought getting the doorbell to stop would be a good thing, but he'd almost prefer it to the grating sound of Stiles' voice.

“What do you want, Stiles?” he sighs, holding the door open with his hip, trying to get the message across that he's not inviting Stiles inside.

“I just— I thought— I wanted to, uh,” Stiles sputters, like he hadn't bothered to plan past ringing the doorbell, and then he takes a deep breath and composes himself before saying, in a laughably dramatic voice, “I have something important to tell you.”

Danny feels a laugh bubbling up inside him, a dry, humorless bark of a laugh stuck underneath his tongue and behind his lungs, and he has to take a second to swallow it down because jesus, he doesn't want anyone thinking he's gone absolutely insane, even if it's just Stiles.

“Scott already told me about werewolves,” he says instead, and starts to close the door.

Somehow, Stiles – with the reflexes of a dead cat, the same guy who wouldn't catch a lacrosse ball if you tossed it underhand into his net – manages to catch the door with his foot just seconds before it closes.

“No, that's not— I mean, what? He did?”

It's not entirely true; Danny had figured most of it out on his own. Between Derek Hale, the animal attacks, the random destruction of property, the weirdness with Jackson, Scott and Stiles acting even stranger than usual, and a few strategically dropped hints from Lydia, who he suspects took pity on him for being the only one out of the loop, it hadn't been too hard to figure out what was going on. It was something fucked up, that was for sure, and from there werewolves wasn't really too much of a stretch. Scott hadn't had to say anything directly for Danny to know it wasn't a mountain lion that killed his dad. All it took was the look on Scott's face when he said “I'm sorry” at the funeral.

“Yeah,” Danny said. “Told me all about them. Are you happy now? Can you go?”

Stiles shakes his head, shouldering the door open a little more.

“So, you know?”

“Yes. I know.”

“And you're not, like, totally freaked out?”

Danny shrugs. Honestly, he's too tired to be freaked out. He's exhausted, the sort of bone-deep weariness that comes from constant motion or bewildered confusion or holding your breath for too long.

“Oh,” Stiles says. And for once, with Stiles, there's a silent moment.

And because Danny is tired of silent moments, tired of the awkward pauses when someone doesn't know what to say, doesn't know how to say “your dad is dead and that sucks and I'm glad I'm not you” in a socially acceptable way, because he's tired of not saying the things everyone is thinking, he goes ahead and ventures a guess that he's been holding in since he first got the call from the hospital.

“It was him, wasn't it?”

“We don't know who it was, Danny,” Stiles says quickly, and Danny doesn't believe him. “It could have been anyone. A stray omega, or another pack, or...”

Danny shakes his head and insists, because it's been bothering him since it happened, it's been eating away at him almost as much as the fact that his dad is gone, that he'll never again get to see the man who taught him how to ride a bike and taught him how to throw a lacrosse ball and taught him not to let it get to him when a boyfriend does something that makes him want to scream.

“He and Aiden skipped down the same day. It was them, wasn't it?”

Stiles blanches. Danny never thought he'd see him rendered so utterly speechless.

“We don't know,” he repeats, slowly, cautiously.

Danny wants to punch something. He wants to shake it out of him. He wants someone to tell him what they're all dancing around. Just wants someone to be blunt and merciless enough to say: your boyfriend was a werewolf and he killed your dad. He wants someone to tell him: your father is dead and it's all your fault.

He wants to cry.

He doesn't, though, just walks away from the door, leaving Stiles to come or go as he likes, because he doesn't have the energy anymore to try to close it with Stiles standing half-between the door and the jamb, looking at him like one wrong word could break him.

“Look, Danny...” Stiles says quietly, and Danny doesn't have to look to know he's already made his way into the house. He could have guessed it would happen, Stiles had never been good with boundaries. “That's not what I came to talk to you about.”

Danny doesn't dislike Stiles. They'd been friends, once, before Jackson decided Danny was cool and Stiles and Scott weren't, and Danny had been happy to go along with that because Jackson had an X-Box and what seemed like a thousand games and being cool meant no one would care if he didn't get a girlfriend. There had actually been days when he genuinely liked Stiles, like the Halloween they'd both shown up to school as Robin and instead of fighting over it Stiles had suggested they just say Danny was Dick Grayson and Stiles was Jason Todd. But, dislike or not, Stiles took energy to deal with. Copious amounts, really, just for Danny to kickstart his brain enough to even start to keep up with Stiles' never-ending, ever-changing train of thought.

Danny stares through the doorway into the kitchen for a minute, trying to piece together a request for Stiles to leave that doesn't sound like something Jackson would have said. And he opens his mouth, thinking he's got it. And the his mind blanks, and all he can think is, well, at least Stiles hadn't brought another casserole.

“What?” he ends up snapping, because that's the only coherent sentence he can put together.

The look Stiles gives him when he turns back around to look at him is strained, frayed. Like Stiles is just barely holding onto the end of some very long rope. Like something deep in his chest is about to snap, or maybe like something already has.

A thought flickers through Danny's mind, so brief he's almost unaware: he looks the way I feel.

“I just...” Stiles starts, looking down at his hands like he doesn't know what to do with them. He clears his throat, clearly tripping over words in his head. “I thought you might want to know... I mean....”

“Stiles,” Danny says.

“You're not alone, okay?” he finally blurts out, and Danny isn't sure what he means until he clarifies, “You're not the only one. Who's had to go through this. So... if you need anybody...”

And then it clicks: Stiles' mom. Of course. Danny could kick himself for not realizing sooner. Because Stiles had gone through the same thing, if minus the werewolves. Supernatural creature attacks or not, losing a parent isn't anything that's particularly easy to cope with. And Danny remembers, back in middle school, Stiles' panic attacks and all the school he missed while his mother was in the hospital and the empty look in his eyes when he came back to school the day after the funeral, trying to cover over the obvious hurt with stupid jokes.

Of course.

He looks at Stiles for a long time. Stiles just stands there, quietly, looking back at him, and he's surprised that for once Stiles isn't tripping over himself to amend or clarify his statement, Stiles isn't filling the empty space with words no one else can quite follow, Stiles isn't saying anything.

Stiles is waiting.

So he says, “Thanks, Stiles.”

It's not the most heartfelt response, he knows, but it's about all he can manage right now.

He doesn't know how long they stand there, but it can't be too long before his mom pushes the door open, balancing groceries in one hand and putting her keys back into her purse with the other.

“Oh,” she says, when she sees Stiles. “Hello, Stiles.”

“Hi, Mrs. Mahealani,” he answers without missing a beat. “I was just stopping by. My dad sends his condolences.”

Danny sees his mom's face tense, almost imperceptibly, around her lips at the reminder, but she hides it behind a smile and puts the groceries down.

“Thank you, Stiles. Are you staying for dinner? We've got plenty of food.”

She gestures around the kitchen at the piles of casserole dishes, but Stiles shakes his head.

“No, I should be going. I have to pick Scott up from work, his bike's in the shop.”

“Are you sure?” she asks, out of politeness, because Danny's mother has always been infuriatingly polite. “It's been a long day, I'm sure you could use some food.”

“Thank you, but I have to go.”

Stiles is out the door before she can insist, and Danny makes a mental note that maybe telling Stiles to leave is the wrong way to go about getting him to go away; maybe his mom is onto something, because Stiles is the kind of guy who will always do the opposite of what you say.

With Stiles gone, Danny feels himself start breathing again.

His mom's right. She always is. It's been a long day. It's been a long month, his mother crying late at night when she thinks the kids are all asleep, his sister pretending to eat at meals, his baby brother's face when they had to explain to him that daddy wasn't coming home no matter how long he sat in the windowsill staring at the driveway. Hell, it's been a long year, hospitalized twice, losing a best friend and two boyfriends, and now this...

“Danny?” his mom says. “Are you alright?”

“I'm fine,” he answers, not because he is, but because she looks like she might break if he weren't.

…

 

Ms. Morrell tells him he can take a leave of absence from school, if he needs to. Can take an extra week off and take his midterms when school starts again in January. He doesn't have to take them now, he doesn't have to think about school if it's too hard for him. She can get it all sorted out for him, all he has to do is say the word.

He shakes his head firmly and says thank you, but no.

Memorizing dates, plowing through pages of physics equations, checking and re-checking problem sets, outlining practice essay after practice essay, it's all easier than having to think. It's busy work, it takes up time, it keeps his brain off things that might destroy him if he let himself sit still for too long. He'd much rather agonize over integration and differentiation than think about sitting up with his mom in the hospital that night, or the way his sister's face looked at the funeral. He'd much rather mull over stupid facts about populism and the Great Depression than remember his dad's laugh or his stupid clashing ties.

It's not as good as if it had been lacrosse season; channeling everything into physical activity would have been nice, not even having to let his brain do any work, focusing all his energy on the pumping of blood through his veins, the steady rhythm of his labored breaths, the shaking of his muscles when he overworks them. If Jackson had still been around, they would have done nothing but practice for the new season, running laps in Jackson's neighborhood or throwing lacrosse balls back and forth for hours in the park.

But cross country season is over already, lacrosse won't start until January, and Danny was never great with the cold. Too hard on his lungs.

So he studies his way through the last week of classes, barely looking up from his books long enough to talk to anyone. And he takes every exam. And he comes out of each one fairly confident he's aced them all.

His dad would have been proud.

And then school is over, and he's been dreading this, because there's nothing else to distract him.

The last day of exams finds him in the locker room, emptying out his gym locker so he can give his uniform and pads a much-needed wash before the season starts up. He's alone, trying to shove them into his backpack, which is way too small to really fit everything. It's quiet, it's dark. The only thing he can hear is the sound of his own breath. His chest aches, like it always does when the temperature starts to drop, and he's rubbing at his ribs absently, taking a few slow, deep breaths, when he hears something behind him.

“Danny.”

He doesn't turn around fast enough, even though he's knocked his bag to the ground, and Ethan is already less than a foot in front of him by the time he can see him. He wants to move backwards, move away, but there's a row of lockers right behind him and nowhere to go. He's trapped.

And he's terrified.

“What do you want?” he says, concentrating on keeping his voice even.

Shame is the only word Danny can come up with for the look on Ethan's face. Shame, and maybe fear. Shame, and fear, and guilt.

“To apologize,” Ethan says, and maybe Danny didn't need to keep his voice steady because Ethan's certainly isn't.

There's a part of Danny, a very small part, that wants to reach out and hold him and tell him it's okay. That wants to kiss him again. That same small part that a month ago Danny had thought might fall in love with him.

It's a very small part.

“So it was you, then?” he asks.

“It was— no, it,” Ethan swallows. “Danny, that's not what happened. It's—it wasn't... It wasn't supposed to happen like that—“

“And how was it supposed to happen, then?” Danny snaps, and pushes Ethan back so he can move away from the lockers. Away from him. He doesn't know where the energy came from, or the courage, to push a werewolf, to push his father's killer. But he's not scared of Ethan. Not even a little bit.

When Ethan doesn't respond, Danny finds he keeps talking.

“What, you were just gonna hurt him a little? He got in the way? It was all some horrible misunderstanding? He was secretly a vampire? What pathetic excuse do you have for killing my father, huh? Please, tell me, I'd love to hear it. Really.”

He's not exactly sure how it happened, but now Ethan is the one backed up against the locker, Danny's hand almost at his throat, and Danny is shaking.

Ethan growls, a low, angry sound in the back of his throat, and his eyes flash a bright, inhuman blue as he grabs Danny's wrist, his nails extending into sharp, grotesque claws.

They're starting to scratch Danny's skin, and he's aware that it should hurt, but all he can find himself thinking, looking at the cracked, yellowing claws is: eww, I slept with this guy?

There's a distant part of his mind telling him to scream, reminding him that he's just pissed off a killer werewolf, warning him that this could be it, he might very well die right now.

And then there's a roar, from the other side of the locker room, and he's pretty sure he hears Ethan _whimper._

And Scott McCall is there, and yeah Danny knows about werewolves, but this is absolutely the weirdest fucking thing that's ever happened to him.

Scott's eyes are glowing red, a warm, comforting color, and he pulls Ethan off of Danny like Ethan's a misbehaving puppy. Scott growls, and Ethan whimpers, and Danny feels something new, just then. Not fear or the heart-rending sadness he's gotten used to. No, Danny feels pity.

He turns back to his locker and finishes packing his bag.

Ethan's gone when he turns back around, a hushed conversation he missed between the two werewolves, but Scott's still there, looking at him like he might break.

“What?” he snaps, because he hates that look. Hates the apologies. Hates being handled with kid gloves. But Scott doesn't flinch, just clears his throat.

“Have you talked to Stiles recently?” he asks.

“Yeah, why?”

Scott chooses his words carefully, something Danny wishes he'd teach Stiles to do.

“He thinks you hate him.”

Danny laughs.

“I don't hate Stiles.”

It's the truth. He may not _like_ Stiles, he may be _annoyed_ with Stiles, but he doesn't hate him. He doesn't have the energy to hate him. He doesn't even have the energy to hate Ethan, not really, so hating Stiles? It hadn't even occurred to him.

“You should tell him that,” Scott says. His voice is soft and Danny can't help but find himself thinking that it's comforting, that with everything else, something about Scott is actually comforting. Maybe it's a werewolf thing. Maybe, he thinks, remembering Scott's mother saving his life two months before when he was poisoned, it's just a McCall thing.

“Tell Stiles I don't hate him?”

“He's pretty bummed out about it.”

Danny sits down on the bench, rubs his eyes.

“He gets it, Danny,” Scott says. “I know you think he's annoying but.... he does get it. All of it.”

Scott's right. Danny knows he's right. So he nods. 

. . .

 

“I don't hate you,” he says, standing behind Stiles, who is digging through the bottom of his locker, a trash can full of old homework and candy wrappers next to him.

Stiles turns around, almost falling over, upsetting the trash can on his way, a half-full bag of skittles scattering across the linoleum floor.

“What?” Stiles says, once he's caught his balance again, his face contorted into some hardly believable baffled expression.

“I don't hate you,” Danny repeats, slinging his bag over his shoulder and starting towards the door to go home. “Have a good Christmas.”

“Wait—!” Stiles says, springing to his feet and following a few steps after him until Danny stops.

He turns back and raises an eyebrow at Stiles, who still seems to be tripping over his feet.

“Do you want to get dinner sometimes?” Stiles blurts out.

Danny blinks at him for a minute, taking longer to process the words than Stiles had taken to come up with them.

“Are you asking me out?”

“No!” Stiles says. “No, no. I just... Well, I mean, you _know._ I don't... get much of a chance to talk to other humans about this kind of stuff. I mean, I get it if you don't, it's a lot to process or whatever, but—“

Maybe it's because he's feeling generous. Maybe it's because he's too tired to argue. Or maybe it's because he actually things talking about it might help, and it's not like there's much of an option when it comes to people to talk to. But Danny cuts Stiles off, puts him out of his babbling misery.

“Coffee?”

Stiles nods. “Yeah. Great, yeah. Coffee sounds good. Text me or something. 

. . .

 

“Danny?” Emily says, and she's only a blurry shadow in his doorway as he blinks his eyes open and reaches over to his bedside table, fumbling for his glasses. She's sniffling, her voice thick and tight like she's been crying, and he sits up, reaching his arms out for her.

“Hey, Em,” he says softly, wrapping his arms around her when she sits on the edge of his bed, pulling her knees up to her chest. “What's up?”

“I had a nightmare,” she says, and she sounds like suddenly she's four years old again, not thirteen, and she looks so, so small, her voice shaky. She wipes her eyes on one too-long pajama sleeve. “It was about dad.”

Danny hugs her tighter and she buries her face in his chest. She's trying not to cry, he can tell, so he says, “hey, it's okay. It's okay, Em.”

Their dad had always called her Emmy, so Danny avoids the extra syllable.

She cries herself out, soaking Danny's t-shirt through, and falls asleep there nearly an hour later, and at some point he must, too, because he wakes up at noon on the first day of winter break with his sister hogging all the blankets and his glasses pressed awkwardly into his cheek, red marks all over his face from where they must have been pressed into the pillow.

He gets up, makes sure the blankets are wrapped comfortably around her, and goes downstairs to make pancakes.

. . .

 

The next afternoon, the second day of winter break, while his mom's at work, he takes Josh and Emily to go pick out a Christmas tree. Josh keeps pointing at ones that are too big for their living room, and Emily keeps trying to take pity on trees with crooked branches or missing limbs. He picks out a nearly perfect tree, the best they've ever had, the most symmetrical tree you've ever seen. He loads it on top of his car and drives Josh and Emily to Starbucks to buy them all hot chocolate.

That evening he and Emily decorate the tree while his mom and Josh bake Christmas cookies. The radio plays carols softly in the background and they drink eggnog and for a few short hours, everything feels almost normal. Danny sits Josh on top of his shoulders so Josh can put the star on top of the tree.

When Josh and Emily go to sleep, he puts on his headphones and turns on the loudest pop music he can find amidst some 50 gigs of illegally downloaded loud pop music, and he plays Skyrim for three hours.

He falls asleep in his desk chair, and dreams that he's a werewolf.

When he wakes up in the middle of the night, disoriented and shaking, and walks across the hall to the bathroom to get a glass of water, he hears crying from the kitchen.

He feels something in the pit of his stomach, a sick awful feeling that he seems to be getting a ot recently when he looks at his family. He tries not to call it guilt.

“I just don't know how this could have happened,” his mom says when she hears him on the stairs. “It's still so hard to believe.”

He wants to say, you don't know the half of it. He wants to say, you want to hear something unbelievable? He wants to curl up in his mom's lap and have her pet his hair and tell him it's going to be okay, like she used to when he was a kid.

Instead, he says, “I know.”

. . .

 

On the third day of winter break, the day before Christmas eve, he finally texts Stiles.

It's not much, just “hey.” But he gets an almost instantaneous response, “hey!!!”

“coffee?” he texts back, and the response this time is “3pm starbucks?”

Danny gets there at 2:50 and waits in his car, Marina and the Diamonds blaring from his stereo. The clock seems stuck, refusing to turn to 2:51 or 2:52 and he's already regretting this decision, already wants this whole afternoon to be over with. But he did agree he'd get coffee with Stiles, and he only has to do it once, just has to get through a half hour and then he can make an excuse about needing to go so he can pick up Emily from her friend's house since his mom has her hands full. Just has to make it to 3:30.

Some part of his mind sardonically asks, what would Scott McCall do?

At 2:55, he turns the car off and goes inside. He gets his coffee, sits down, and waits.

At 3:10, Stiles comes stumbling through the door, spots him, and makes his way over to Danny's table, spilling an armful of worn-looking notebooks onto the table as he slides into the seat across from Danny. Danny lifts the coffee cup off the table just in time that it doesn't get overturned as the mountain of notebooks becomes an avalanche of notebooks, and raises an eyebrow at Stiles.

Stiles is still looking at the notebooks.

“So the whole silver thing?” Stiles begins. “Is a myth. Silver doesn't do shit to werewolves, or at least, not any more than any other metal does.”

Stiles looks like he hasn't slept in a week. His hair doesn't even look brushed, let alone styled like it usually is, and he's paler than usual. The bags under his eyes almost match Danny's. His hands, Danny notices when he starts flipping through the pages of one of the notebook – full of handwritten notes, he can see now, that look like they're almost all on werewolf behavior – are shaking. He tries to catch Stiles' eye but Stiles keeps glancing away, anywhere but him.

“Wolfsbane works, though, and mistletoe—though you, uh, probably know from experience that mistletoe also works on people. Direct exposure to mistletoe can poison them. Mountain ash can create a barrier they can't cross, and—“

“Whoa,” he says, catching one of Stiles' hands with him. “Hold up, slow down.”

Stiles looks up at him, finally, and Danny almost flinches away. His eyes are wide, almost hollow. Danny's watched Supernatural, as much as he hates to admit it (he's totally not embarrassed, it was just because the one brother was really hot, and it was only a couple of episodes, jesus) and some part of his mind wants to say Stiles looks almost possessed. There's a... a darkness there, behind his eyes, like it's hiding just behind a thin curtain. Like if Danny said one thing wrong, it might break through.

He takes his hand away, just in case.

“I thought—“ Stiles starts.

“I thought we were getting coffee,” Danny says, putting his cup back down on the table. “Not studying for the werewolf SATs.”

“Oh,” Stiles says.

He looks at the coffee for a second, swallows, and then nods.

“Right.”

Stiles rubs his eyes with the back of his wrist, blinks a few times, and then gets up and heads to the counter. The line's gotten longer since Danny walked in the door, the tables around them starting to fill up, and Stiles' foot taps impatiently as he waits, the person at the front of the line explaining a complicated, personalized order.

One of the notebooks has made it's way across to the edge of Danny's side of the table in the avalanche – a little moleskine with bits of paper sticking out the edges, photocopies pages – and Danny isn't here to talk about werewolves, doesn't want to know about werewolves, but... well, Danny can't help but be curious.

He picks it up, takes the elastic band off, and starts flipping through the pages.

It's a detailed, hectic mess, photocopies and printed phone-quality photos of police reports, hospital files, newspaper articles, cut out and taped into the pages, some of them folded over where they're too big to fit in the pages. Things are highlighted, whole chunks of information, other things are circled in red, arrows connecting pieces together, notes referencing other pages, other articles, scrawled in the margins. It looks like something straight out of a detective film; all it's missing is a bulletin board with red yarn and pushpins.

There are some loose papers tucked in the folds of other pages, and he flips to one – a sheet of notebook paper, torn out of a spiral-bound notebook, the frayed edge still attached along the perforated line – and on it, a familiar drawing. He'd seen Lydia drawing it in nearly every class at the beginning of the year.

“It's called the Nemeton,” Stiles says from behind him, and he jumps, shutting the notebook.

“I thought you were getting coffee,” he says, once he's managed to start breathing again.

Stiles holds up a red paper cup. “Hot chocolate. Coffee doesn't react well with my meds.”

He sits back down across from Danny.

“Time does... weird things around the Nemeton. Even pictures of it. Lydia missed entire classes drawing it. I still lose hours sometimes.”

"It's a tree," Danny says slowly.

"Yep," Stiles answers, taking a sip of hot chocolate. "Magic tree. Evil magic tree."

"And what about these?" Danny asks, pointing to one of the police reports stapled to the pages.

"That's what I'm trying to figure out."

Danny thinks he's going to elaborate, but he doesn't. He just takes the moleskine back and tucks it away under the rest of the notebooks.

"So, uh," he says after a minute. "How's your break?"

"It's fine," Danny says.

He stares at his coffee for a while, waiting for Stiles to say something, but with werewolves off the table and Danny's dead dad acting as the elephant in the room, it looks like they really don't have anything to talk about. He's never bothered to wonder what he might have in common with Stiles Stilinski. Now he's busier wondering which uncomfortable topic Stiles is going to bring up first.

"Scott didn't tell you about werewolves," Stiles says after a minute. "I asked him. He says he didn't tell you anything."

"Yeah," Danny says.

"So what was it? Lucky guess?"

"You guys aren't subtle," Danny answers. "Or quiet. I thought you were talking about a video game or something until Lydia got involved."

He finishes his coffee, glances at his watch. 3:20. Slowly, he starts to resign himself to the fact that they're going to have to talk about werewolves eventually.

"So, are all these about werewolves?" he asks, pointing at the notebooks.

"Some of them. I've been copying out parts if the Argents' bestiary. Anything that looks like it might be helpful. Weirder things than werewolves have been appearing since we woke up the Nemeton."

"Weirder things, like Jackson?"

"Weirder than him, if you can believe it. Other kinds of shape shifters. Japanese river demons. We even found a couple of faeries."

"You're kidding," Danny says, but he can already tell from the look on Stiles' face that he's not. "And this is all because of the evil magic tree?"

Stiles takes a while to answer, taking a sip of his hot chocolate and then looking at Danny for a minute.

Then he says, "Look, Danny. The best way to deal with the supernatural is to not get involved."

Something tells Danny to just listen to him, to let it go and go home and be with his family on Christmas. But he finds himself speaking up anyway.

"I'm already _involved,_ Stiles. Jackson, Ethan, Lydia... I'm having coffee with a freaking supernatural guru."

"I'm not a--I'm not anything," Stiles says.

"Neither was my dad," Danny snaps, and there it is, the second thing Danny didn't want to talk about today.

Stiles is silent.

"My dad wasn't _involved._ But he wasn't safe."

He can feel the anger boiling up in his chest, like it did when he saw Ethan again. It isn't fair, nothing about it is fair. It isn't fair that his dad was collateral damage in some supernatural dick-measuring contest. It isn't fair that he's gotten pulled into all of this against his will. It isn't fair that his little brother is going to have to grow up without a father around, without _their_ father around, without Ken Mahealani, the best dad, the best _man_ Danny's ever known.

"You should stay out of it," Stiles says.

Danny stands up, pulling his keys out if his pocket.

"I have to go pick my sister up," he says, and heads out the door without a second glance at Stiles.

 . . .

 

Christmas is a blur of routine Danny almost doesn't remember. Opening gifts his dad had already bought and wrapped, leaving carrots on the roof for Santa's reindeer like his dad already had. Trying not to mention things: this was dad's favorite Christmas song, these were dad's favorite Christmas cookies, this is the joke dad used to make every year on the way to Christmas mass.

There are vague discussions of Danny's grandma coming up from Hawaii to stay with them for a few weeks when the tourist season lets down and the flights get less expensive.

His mom starts work again.

He most certainly doesn't spend the whole holiday thinking about werewolves.

. . .

 

Except that he does.

Except that the day after Christmas he knocks on Stiles' front door, as loud and insistent as Stiles had been two weeks before, and when St les answers the door, demands he sit down and answer a lengthy list of questions that Danny's come up with over the past two days. The important stuff, the stuff he'll need to know to stay alive.

Stiles flops down in his bed, leaving Danny the desk chair, and Danny sits his notebook down on top of Stiles' laptop where he can read it without having to hold it. Stiles' walls, he notices, are covered in the same kinds of things as the notebooks he'd seen the other day, one wall with grotesque, hopefully exaggerated drawings of things like vampires and pixies, notes scrawled onto the white space of the pages, the other with more police reports, medical records Stiles should never have legally been able to access, crime scene photos Danny's sure the Sheriff has realized are missing.

“Ask away,” Stiles says, once the door has swung shut.

“What happened to Jackson?” Danny starts, reading the first question on the list – this one more out of curiosity than practicality.

Twenty minutes later, when his head is buzzing with words like “kanima” and “mountain ash” and “beta,” he turns back to his notebook and asks the next question.

It must be hours, he thinks, but he can't see Stiles' clock from where he's sitting and he's too busy listening, scratching down the occasional note, to pull out his phone and look at the time.

By the end, he knows how to defend himself against werewolves, what their weaknesses are, more than he ever wanted to hear about pack dynamics, more than he ever wanted to hear about _faeries_ and how apparently being tricked be them is a pretty unpleasant experience, and the complete story of why he was poisoned by their English teacher and how she was brought back from the dead in the first place.

“So, the Nemeton,” he starts, “was dead.”

“Cut down, but temporarily given back power by Paige,” Stiles adds, pushing himself up on his elbows and nodding. “Yep.”

“And you, Scott, and Allison brought it back to life again by killing yourselves?”

“Not directly, but that's the basic idea.”

“And that's why there aren't just werewolves now, there are fairies and stuff.”

“Exactly.”

“That's fucked up,” he says, and Stiles laughs, but it's an empty, hollow laugh. The kind of laugh that doesn't reach his eyes.

“Is that why you're so... you know,” Danny asks, gesturing vaguely at his face.

Stiles freezes for a second, and Danny can see the decision flicker over his face, whether or not to lie, whether or not to pretend he has no clue what Danny's talking about.

But then he answers, “yeah.”

He sits up and continues, “Being around Scott and Allison helps. But I'm not really one for being a third wheel.”

Danny gets that. He had his fair share of tagging along with Jackson and Lydia when they were together, and it might not be quite as dramatic as what Stiles is going through, but it's the same sentiment.

“There's got to be something else that helps,” Danny says.

“I just try not to think about it.”

Danny glances around the room at the walls and the notebooks and the papers scattered across the floor.

“Is that what all this is for? To distract you?”

Stiles shakes his head. “I just don't like feeling useless.”

He can see there's something Stiles isn't telling him, but Stiles' hands haven't shaken this whole time he's been talking, saying everything he knows about werewolves from memory. His voice hasn't wavered since they got to his room. His eyes haven't darkened since Danny got here. Maybe it focuses him, Danny thinks, thinking back to times he saw Stiles study, really sit down and study, his focus like a laser, full of intensity and razor-sharp when he could manage it.

Maybe it helps.

But Danny doesn't like feeling useless either, and if Stiles feels like he's helping somehow with all of this...

“I could help,” Danny says, and then clarifies, waving at the walls. “With all of this. There's got to be information you can't get. I can get into the hospital's computer records, things like that. I can access security tapes. I can be a second pair of eyes or a sounding board or whatever.”

Stiles looks at him closely for a second, and then nods.

“Alright.”

He spends another hour and a half catching Danny up to speed. Murders that look entirely unrelated – some like animal attacks, some like real murders, some like werewolf attacks, some worse. Unconnected victims, almost random, except in a pattern of location... the bodies found in a spiral that spreads it's way across the map of Beacon Hills.

“It's a symbol of revenge,” Stiles says, as Danny traces the spiral on the map with his index finger. “Peter Hale used it, when he came back to kill the Argents. Werewolves use it all the time to show that they're coming back to hurt those who hurt them. But... none of the victims have anything to do with werewolves, none of them have any reason someone would want revenge on them.”

Danny moves his finger down two boxes from the bottom of the spiral, to where he knows there's now a parking lot, poorly lit at night, behind the new grocery store by his house. He steps back and traces the spiral out, following it's proportions to its logical next course.

They don't intersect.

“I know,” Stiles says. “I tried it too. The night after I came over your house, I thought maybe if I could tell you it hadn't been Ethan, that it had been something else...”

Stiles shakes his head, his voice getting quieter. “Your dad doesn't fit the pattern.”

Danny steps away from the map and nods.

“Too good to be true, right?” he says, dryly, and then he closes his notebook and shoves it in his back pocket. “I should get going, it's late.”

It isn't until he says it that he realizes how true it is – it's already dark outside. He's not sure how he didn't notice.

“Oh,” Stiles says. “Okay, yeah, great. Let me know if you find anything?”

Danny nods and heads for the door, but he finds the question slipping out before he can really figure out what he's asking.

“How long does it take to stop hurting like this?” he asks.

Stiles looks at him for a long minute, his fingers twitching in some strange, aborted gesture, and then he answers: “It doesn't.”

. . .

 

The next day, Danny wakes up to a text: “starbucks, 11:30?”

He looks at the clock. It's 11. And it is way, way too early to deal with werewolves or murders or Stiles.

“got a thing. 2?” he texts back, and gets a quick “great” in response.

He showers, gets dressed, finds something to eat, and spends the afternoon with Emily and Josh. He drives Emily to her friend's house, he teaches Josh how to play the new Animal Crossing game he got for Christmas. The sick feeling in his stomach doesn't go away, but he ignores it.

Two o'clock comes around faster than he thought it would. He's late, and Stiles is already sitting down with a cup of hot chocolate and some papers spread across the table by the time he gets there.

They talk for hours – Danny's found a couple files Stiles had been missing, and Stiles has been trying to talk to his dad to see if there's anything he's missing, reading through the bestiary to see if anything can help, but they aren't exactly making much progress.

It's shockingly not unpleasant, spending hours talking to Stiles. Stiles still rambles, still talks over him, still has trains of thought Danny can't exactly follow or connect all the time, but they manage to communicate pretty well, better than on group projects for chemistry class.

He thinks back to what Scott said about Stiles thinking Danny hated him. But the truth is Danny's never really known what to think of Stiles. He could be annoying, and frequently was, but in a way it was endearing some of the time. And there was always something to be said for his enthusiasm. The truth is, Danny's never bothered to form an opinion about Stiles.

But sitting in Starbucks with cold coffee and the sun going down outside, he thinks there isn't any reason not to like Stiles.

“It's getting dark,” Stiles says after a few hours, and Danny finds himself, for the first time in weeks, not wanting to go home.

“Yeah,” he says.

“You probably have to get home, right?” Stiles asks, and Danny shrugs.

Stiles is right, he knows Stiles is right, he knows he should get home, help his mom cook dinner, play video games with Emily, teach Josh how to start the new puzzle he got for Christmas, and then play video games all night because he can't sleep and doesn't want to try. But he doesn't want to.

“The barista's giving us dirty looks,” Stiles says again when Danny hesitates.

“Yeah, I guess I should be getting home.”

“I'll walk you to your car,” Stiles says.

They clean up the notebooks on the table, pile them into Stiles' backpack, and head out. The parking lot is practically empty, the streetlights reflecting back up off the white snow around it. He hadn't realized it had gotten so late.

He unlocks his car and turns back to say bye to Stiles.

Then, he sees something in Stiles' eyes – not the weird possessed-looking darkness, but something else.

Then, he realizes what it is.  
  
Then, Stiles' lips are on him. Then, Stiles is kissing him with a messy, unpracticed imprecision, his mouth warm and eager. He doesn't even have time to register what's going on before Stiles is pulling away.

“Sorry, shit, sorry, I should have—that was shitty of me. I should have asked, or...”

Danny tries to say, it's okay, it's fine, calm down. But he can't form words. He can't see, not really, his vision of Stiles whiting out around the edges a little, blurring. He can't think, not of anything other than Ethan's lips on his, Ethan's hands in his, fingers tangling together, Ethan's hands... covered in blood, his father's blood, _his_ blood—

He.

He can't.

Can't _breathe._

“Danny?”

He hears Stiles like he's underwater and Stiles is yelling from just above it. Thick, quiet, obstructed.

Ethan's claws.

“Danny!”

Ethan's fangs, bared.

“Danny, stay with—“

His father's blood on his hands.

“I need you to listen to—“

Stiles' hands on his back.

Ethan—

“Hey,”

Blood—

Stiles' hands in his hands.

“Look at me.”

A ragged gasp of air.

Ethan's hands...

Stiles' hands.

Dad—?!

Oxygen.

“Danny, can you look at me?”

He nods, just a little, taking a few quick breaths, nearly hyperventilating, until Stiles takes Danny's hand and puts it on his own chest.

“Here, follow my breaths.”

Stiles' breaths are slow, evenly spaced, freakishly calm. They're an anchor in a storm. They're an oxygen tank.

When his breathing is steady again, each inhale matching Stiles', each exhale full and deep, he blinks his eyes open and looks up.

Stiles gives him a cautious smile. “Better?”

He nods, and Stiles moves away.

“What was that?” he asks. He's sitting on the ground, half on the paved asphalt and half in the brown slushy snow at the side of the lot. He doesn't know when that happened.

“Panic attack,” Stiles says. “I used to get them a lot after, uh, when my mom died.”

“How did you know how to do that?”

Stiles looks at him for a moment, like he doesn't want to answer.

“You were reaching out for me. Some people can't deal with physical contact when they're having a panic attack but... I took an educated guess.”

Danny nods. He remembers his dad saying how when he was a baby, the only thing that would make him stop crying was someone picking him up. He thinks it makes sense, that physical contact would be a comfort. It always has been.

“Thank you,” he says softly.

Stiles shakes his head. “Don't. I— I shouldn't have kissed you. I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking.”

Danny's not sure he's ever heard Stiles apologize for anything. Not the countless times Stiles bugged him in class or accidentally hit him in the head with a lacrosse ball or irritated Jackson to the point where Jackson punched something or pestered Lydia into going out with him. Stiles never seemed like the apologetic type.

But...

“It was my fault,” Danny says.

“What, me kissing you? How could that possibly be your fault? What, you think you're so hot I couldn't help myself?”

“My dad,” Danny says, clarifying his previous statement. “It's my fault my dad died.”

Stiles is still so close he can hear him swallow.

“No,” he says. “It wasn't.”

“It was,” Danny insists. “Ethan wouldn't have even stuck around if it wasn't for me. Dad never would have even gotten close to this—“

“Ethan didn't kill him,” Stiles says, calmly, evenly.

“What?”

“I was going to tell you...”

“You were going to tell me what, Stiles?” he says, starting to get impatient.

“You know the spiral, right?” Stiles says, and looks around for a second before standing up and breaking a branch off the tree in front of Danny's car. He flattens out a patch of snow and then uses the stick to draw the spiral in it, as if Danny hasn't seen it before, as if Danny doesn't see it not every time he closes his eyes.

“Yeah,” he says. “I know the spiral.”

“It's not a spiral,” Stiles says.

“What?”

“They found another body this morning. I'm not sure yet but... But I think it's something else.”

He looks at the spiral for a second, and then takes the stick and draws a vertical line through the center, starting two inches above the top of the spiral and finishing four inches below.

“I saw this symbol in the bestiary the other day. I thought... I thought it was just a mistake, there are a lot of weird things and misspellings, it's all handwritten. I thought maybe someone was just trying to cross it out or...”

He shakes his head, and looks at the pattern in the snow again.

“I asked Derek about it and he wouldn't say anything, so... well, I asked Peter about it. That's why I texted you this morning.”

“What is it, Stiles?”

“The spiral with the line through it? It doesn't mean revenge. The spiral also can act as a symbol for the evolution of human life, and the line... well, it means a cutting off of that evolution.”

Danny stares at him blankly, trying to process what that means.

“He told me a story about a half-human, half-bear shapeshifter who believed it was his mission to kill all non-shape shifters because he believed that shape shifters were the next natural stage in human evolution, and that any other course of evolution needed to be eliminated. Peter thinks he's back, that the serial killer we're dealing with is him, or at least someone imitating him. That's why he's killing random people without reason.”

“And what about Ethan?” Danny says. “Why did he run if it wasn't his fault?”

“Maybe they knew. Maybe they saw him and decided to get out of the way before it became an issue.”

Danny's not entirely satisfied with the answer, but... At this point he doesn't have much of a choice.

“So what do we do?”

Stiles shrugs, and holds out a hand to help him up.

“We tell Scott.”

. . .

 

Scott starts making a plan immediately. He enlists the Argents, he gets his whole pack together, he starts talking to a few other shape shifters he knows – including the new girl at school, Kira, who Danny would never have expected to be involved in any of this. He tells Danny it's up to him whether he stays in or out of it, but that it's going to be dangerous and he can't guarantee anyone won't get hurt.

Danny thinks about his mom, about Josh and Emily, about his dad...

And Danny respectfully bows out.

Scott puts a hand on Danny's shoulder, and smiles at him with that sunshine smile, and nods.

“I get it, dude,” he says. “Thanks for all your help. I really appreciate it.”

Stiles nods in his direction, understanding, and Scott goes to brief Isaac on the plan.

And Danny goes home.

. . .

 

Josh and Emily are asleep on the couch when he gets home. His mom is, too, Josh's head on her chest and her arm wrapped around Emily's shoulders. The TV is on mute and Christmas carols are playing in the background, and Danny looks at them for a long time and doesn't feel guilty anymore.

He grabs a quilt off the back of the armchair and drapes it over them carefully.

Josh wipes his eyes, sniffs a little, and looks up.

“Hi, Danny” he says, his voice sleepy and quiet.

“Hey, kiddo,” Danny smiles, and leans down to kiss his forehead. “Go back to sleep, okay?”

“Okay,” Josh says, and closes his eyes again.

He sits in the arm chair for a while, half-watching the silent TV, half-watching his family, mostly waiting for his phone to buzz so Stiles can tell him it went okay, can tell him no one's dead.

At 3:30 in the morning, his phone rings, but by then he's already asleep, too exhausted for the sound to wake him up.

. . .

 

“I just wanted to thank you,” Stiles says when Danny opens the door, half-awake, at seven the next morning.

Danny rubs his eyes. His hair is a mess, he knows, and he's still in the clothes he was wearing the day before. His mouth tastes like something died in it.

“Oh,” Danny says, because his brain is still working overtime to catch up now that he's awake this early.

“Scott got him. Beacon Hills is safe once again, at least temporarily.”

Danny smiles. “Good. No one got hurt?”

“Allison cut pretty scraped up and Isaac broke his leg, but Derek took the brunt of it. He'll be healed up by tomorrow, though. Freaking werewolves.”

Danny's glad, genuinely. But more than that, he's glad to be done with werewolves for a while.

“Stiles?” Danny's mom says from behind him. She must have just woken up.

“Hi, Mrs. Mahealani,” Stiles says.

She leans over Danny's shoulder to smile at him, tired. “I'm making waffles, do you want to stay for breakfast?”

“I'm okay,” Stiles says. “I have to get home anyway. I just wanted to come drop off a present for Danny.”

Danny looks at him for a minute, how tired he looks, notices the box in his hand for the first time.

“Come on,” he says. “Stay for breakfast. Her waffles are the greatest.”

Instead, Stiles just shakes his head, hands him the messily wrapped box and says, “Merry Christmas, Danny,” before walking down the driveway, climbing into the Jeep, and driving away.

 “Do you want to help with waffles, Danny?” his mom says, and he nods, closing the door and moving inside.

 He puts the present down on the counter and forgets about it until later that afternoon. He spends the day with Josh and Emily, who are still entranced by their Christmas presents and keep wanting to show them off to him. They go out to Emily's favorite restaurant for lunch, and Danny makes them pasta for dinner to give his mom a short break from having to do anything.

 After dinner, when he's cleaning up the plates, he sees the box again. 

The paper practically falls off when the starts to open it, and inside is a picture frame. It's not a familiar picture, not at first, but the closer he looks the more familiar it looks. It's a class photo, from kindergarten, and Stiles is in the front row, clearly distracted by something to the left of the camera, his face blurry like he's been turning his head when the shutter went off.

Danny himself is in the back row, smiling wide, oblivious to his horribly crooked teeth. It was before he got his braces, before he got his chest brace, and he's wearing a Batman shirt and a bow tie, so it's after he started dressing himself.

On the side of the photo is Danny's dad. Dressed in the same work clothes he wore every day for as long as Danny can remember. He's distracted, too, probably saying something to Stiles, or maybe to Jackson, who doesn't seem to be paying any attention to the camera either.

Danny thought seeing his dad might hurt.

It doesn't.

On the back of the frame is a sticky note, Stiles' messy handwriting covering it.

 _I'm sorry we weren't in time._ It says. _Your dad was the best teacher I ever had. I can't even imagine how good a dad he was._

“What's that?” his mom says, looking over his shoulder.

Part of him wants to hide it, put it away so she doesn't need a reminder. But instead he says, “It's a picture of dad,” and hands it to her, taking the sticky note off as he does.

She smiles, looking at it.

“It's a great picture,” she says.

She's right. It is.

. . .

 

Stiles answers the door again. Before he can say anything, Danny kisses him.

It's messy and imprecise and warm and Stiles tastes like chocolate and peppermint and doesn't know what to do with his hands and it's the worst kiss Danny has had since middle school, both of them standing awkwardly on either side of the doorway, but it's also the best.

When he pulls away for air, Stiles says, “what?”

“Mistletoe,” Danny says, pointing above them, and Stiles looks up.

“But there isn't any—?” Stiles starts, but Danny cuts him off.

“Do you want to kiss me or not, Stilinski?”

“Oh, I want to kiss you,” Stiles says. “I definitely want to kiss you.”

. . .

 

Danny's mom puts the picture up on the bookshelf, next to Danny and Josh and Emily's school pictures from that year. It looks nice. It feels nice, like he's watching over them somehow, checking in to make sure they're doing okay without them.

And they do.

It's not easy, every day. A lot of the time it's really hard. But each day they wake up and figure things out and get through things together.

Life is different without his dad. But it's still life, he still has to live it. And it's not as hard as he thought it would be.

Stiles helps, coming over to cook sometimes when Danny's mom is too busy. Sometimes he drags the Sheriff along, and he's surprisingly good with kids, entertaining Josh and Emily with stories about exciting cases while Danny and Stiles clean up the table and wash the dishes.

The Sheriff likes Danny, too, says he's a much better first boyfriend for Stiles than he ever expected Stiles to manage to find. He pats Danny on the back in a very paternal way, and Danny isn't sure when he and Stiles officially become boyfriends, but he figures he could do a lot worse. Maybe Stiles is exactly what he needs.

Scott stops by with Stiles a couple of times over break. He tells Danny that he's welcome to help out whenever he wants, that he's pack, too, and they won't let anything happen to him or his family. He says, thanks, but I think I'm going to stay away from the supernatural for a while if I can.

When Stiles is distracted by Emily wanting to show him how good she's gotten at Marvel vs Capcom, Scott lowers his voice and tells Danny that Stiles' darkness is a little bit lighter when Danny is around.

It seems like the kind of thing that should be a lot of pressure. It seems like the kind of thing that would have put him off, a few months ago, would have made him back away or run in the other direction.

But now? Well, in a world as crazy as this one, filled with werewolves and faeries and shapeshifting serial killers, maybe a little commitment, scary as it might be, doesn't seem like such a bad thing.

. . .

 

**Epilogue**

Danny groans as the phone on the bedside table buzzes and Stiles rolls off of him, scrambling to answer it. 

“Do you have to?” he mumbles, sitting up.

“It’s Scott’s ringtone,” Stiles says which, of course, means yes, he has to. 

Danny sits up, leaning against Stiles’ back as Stiles sits on the edge of the bed and answers his phone. 

“Yeah,” Stiles says into the phone, and Danny presses a kiss to the back of Stiles’ bare shoulder. “No, I’m at Danny’s.”

 “Hi, Scott,” Danny says into the phone, leaning over Stiles’ shoulder, his fingers running down Stiles’ back until Stiles shivers. “Kinda hate you right now.”

“Sorry!” he hears Scott squeak through the speaker, and Stiles pulls away a little, moving the phone away from his ear.

“What is it this time?” Danny asks. 

“Poltergeist,” Stiles says. “Very spooky, probably quick.”

“Mom gets home at ten,” Danny says, glancing at the clock. It’s seven.

Stiles looks, too.

“There’s time,” he says. “Right?”

“I guess,” Danny says, a little disappointed. It’s the first day since school started that they’ve had any time to themselves. The house is empty. And there’s a poltergeist somewhere in Beacon Hills.

Stiles reaches over to the other side of the bed and grabs his shirt, pulling it on, and Danny reaches across to fix his hair for him. 

“You could come,” Stiles says, like he does every time. 

Danny hasn’t taken him up on any other occasion. Not the vampires, not the river spirits, not the necromancer. But he’s starting to think maybe he should get a hang of this whole supernatural thing.

“Alright,” he says, grabbing his shirt as well.

And when Stiles smiles, there isn’t a single trace of darkness in his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas, Aoife!


End file.
